(skip this paragraph if you dont want the preamble)
last night i was posed with a problem. we have a bridge in one of our songs (about the concept of morality versus science) that involves me playing a noodle/slash solo while tweaking the cutoff and and doing this spoken word bit about said subject. suffice to say, i aint no kurt cobain when it comes to singing independent melodies. so i decided to sample my spoken word part and set it to infinite release so i could just hit the key at the beginning of the bridge and go into my solo.

so i sample my words into a handheld tape recorder. then while it was playing back into my computer line in/recording in wave lab, i held down the fast forward button so the sample was super fast. then i changed the format to 22 khz. then i opened the wave in cubase which was set to run at 48 khz. needless to say the sample sounded unintelligable and fast by this point, so i was starting to sweat, but at last i had the sample's length down to 8 seconds...

i played the sound into the sample in of my emax and pitched it 2 octaves down...it is one of the most awesome vocal samples i have ever heard. warbly, a little lower pitched than my voice, grainy as h**l, and just plain f**k creepy as sin. i would promise a mp3, but you know me...kind of flaky (still havent posted that SID emulation...)

this might be an obvious trick, but for me, it was a gateway into even weirder sound dimension. i am having a hard not sampling all of my vocals straight of the songs now!

i have some more tips i would like to share, but am being called to the kitchen for a salty snack...

feel free to share. i especially expect piron, hoax, and stabbers in here, unless they want to be marked down for not "rocking out" on their finals...

Last edited by tallowwaters on Wed Jul 04, 2007 6:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's where the early industrial sound came from isn't it, guys trying to fit more samples into their Mirage or whatever and then liking the artifacts?

Hmmm, I don't have any tricky sampler tidbits in my head right now but I'll share a trick I figured out with Live and used in a track which I think is pure genius, and sounds pretty cool too. Was looking for a freaky psychedelic effect for drums in a bridge of a song we were working on.

I ran some drums I'd programmed out of Live and into a Boss Heavy Metal pedal, then into a DM-100 analogue delay. While they played through the delay I tweaked the delay time and feedback which pitch-shifted the drums and freaked them really nicely, but also threw the timing right out. No worries though, recorded it back into Live and then warped the audio back into time with the rest of the song. The result was some freaky pitch-shifting and delays that move in and out without ruining the timing. Would be almost impossible using anything but Live but it was a piece of cake. The hard part was thinking of it in the first place. Will try and find the audio of it and post a sample.

i said this somewhere else
more fun - set up a mic, running through chorus, delay, and reverb. take several different kinds of paper (notebook, newspring, posterboard, bristol, rice) and have you and your friends start crumpling them, tearing them, popping them, and smacking them on the microphone while you sample it. pitch the octave down a few samples, and if possible, combine it with a another paper session pitched a few octaves up.
here it is
http://synthsamples.id.uw.edu.pl/emaxii/paper.mp3

Pitching samples down has always been a favorite trick of mine. You can make just about anything sound cool by doing that. For one track, I played a trill on an acoustic guitar and sampled it. Once it was pitched down a few octaves, it was this crunchy, plodding sound was perfect for my kind of music.

My very favorite sampler trick, though, is to play with the loop points in real time. It can produce popping, but that just adds to the glitchy sound. The EPS has a lot of modulation flexibility when it comes to playing with the loop points. Set a short loop and tweak it for PPG style wavetable sounds, or a longer loop for more rhythmic aberrations. Here's the MP3 of that piece...

The EPS does have a glitch in its OS, though. If you move the loop end point to before the loop start, it will start randomly spitting out samples that still reside in its memory- even if they've been deleted. I've read interviews with Autechre where they comment that it's one of their secret weapons. I came across this bug before ever reading those interviews, but when I did stumble upon it, my first thought was 'hey, this sounds like Autechre.' I recorded a piece using this trick- and some other loop manipulations. The MP3 of it can be found here...

code green wrote:i believe george martin/geoff emerick did this at different times with the beatles--obviously 100% tape though...record hi-speed, then pitch down.

very cool update for the digital age, tho...i look forward to giving this a whirl

EDIT: just listened to the sample and not only like the result but the content too--your words, or a quote, tallow?

thanks.

some of my words, a few lines borrowed from (believe it or not) robin cook.

you have anything to share?

well, i read sphinx because i'm nuts about ancient egypt but i found his prose to be pretty turgid, so--oh, you mean about sampling? well i do most of my sampling on an mpc, so my tricks (such as they are) are pretty specific to that machine and i doubt much of a revelation to anyone who owns one--nevertheless...

on playback, chaining series of multiply triggered sounds with slight tuning, filter, attack, and resolution variations, for huge sounds [a three-in-one pad will trigger another three-in-one pad, which triggers another and so on, all simultaneously]. when playing back in real time, rather than sequencing, like to set pads for poly and f**k with the parameters in the edit screen while pressing repeatedly (with the attack rolled back) for what sound like pitch shifting delays, filtered delays, etc.

on the recording side, i've had some fun by sampling the component parts of an arpeggiated electric guitar part, sequencing them and scrambling them in places. i've also been having a lot of fun lately with a little portastudio i picked up--not only recording certain parts onto tape before transferring to my daw but also transferring whole sections of songs (e.g., intro) first to tape and then back to digital for strange contrast effects. i've also taken to doubling the stereo track of a song recorded in digital onto tape and then flying that back onto two digital tracks--then screwing with the slide/nudge function a few ms to get some crazy flanging effects.

maybe that'll touch off a spark with someone but i feel i have more to learn than to offer here...so please keep the ideas coming, this is good stuff

pour furets said: The EPS does have a glitch in its OS, though. If you move the loop end point to before the loop start, it will start randomly spitting out samples that still reside in its memory- even if they've been deleted. I've read interviews with Autechre where they comment that it's one of their secret weapons. I came across this bug before ever reading those interviews, but when I did stumble upon it, my first thought was 'hey, this sounds like Autechre.' I recorded a piece using this trick- and some other loop manipulations. The MP3 of it can be found here...